Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his book, Black Box Thinking, Matthew Syed cites a very interesting problem solving incident at Unilever. The nozzle they were using to make detergents wasn’t working well at all. So they turned to the in-house experts in the fields of maths, fluid dynamics and high pressure systems. They couldn’t fix the problem. When maths-physics expertise couldn’t do the job, Unilever turned to their experts in (hold your breath) biology! The biologists took 10 copies of the nozzle; made random tweaks to each; and tested them. They then took the one that did the best and repeated the process. After 45 “generations”, they had an outstanding nozzle! The pic below shows how the nozzle “evolved”: The biology technique described above is what they call a “genetic algorithm”. Why that name? Nick Bostrom explained why in his book titled Superintelligence : because it mimics natural selection (mutation, inheritance and selection)! So does this mean trying random tweaks is the way to ...

I remember this old joke from the pre-Internet-is-everywhere era about how German (the language) could eventually rule the world if we gradually started improving the horrible no-method-in-the-madness spelling used in English. Some of the proposals in that joke were: -          use "s"  instead  of  the soft "c" e.g. "Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy"; -          replace the hard "c"  with "k" to "klear up konfusion"; -          replace "ph" with "f" thus making words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter; -          remove double letters, something that has "always ben  a deterent  to akurate  speling"; -          remove silent letters; Add a few more similar such rules and "ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl", the...